by Peter McLean
I had him by the throat a moment later.
TWENTY-FOUR
“Aliyev seems to respect you as my husband, which pleases me,” Ailsa said, later that evening when we were sitting in the drawing room together. I had already chased the servants out so we could talk in peace, and young Billy was in bed.
“Aye,” I said. “I think we understand each other.”
She gave me a look over the rim of her glass that said she knew exactly what I must have done.
“And there I was thinking he might make trouble,” she said, and the corner of her mouth curled into a wry smile.
“I’m boss here, not him,” I said. “I think he grasps that now.”
“As long as you both understand that I am in charge here, that suits me well enough,” she said. “You are my husband and the staff need to treat you as such, but this is my house, Tomas.”
“Aye, I know,” I said. “How many of your household know who you really are?”
“All of them know I am a lady of court,” she said. “Brandt works for the same people I do and he knows my business, but that’s all. He has charge of the house guard, and they answer to him.”
“Well, they’ll have to work alongside my lads,” I said. “I’m not trusting everything to men I don’t know.”
“They’ll work something out between them,” she said. “Dogs always do.”
“My men aren’t dogs.”
She waved a dismissive hand. “You know what I mean. What did you do to Aliyev, by the way?”
“What dogs do,” I snapped at her, and to my surprise she laughed.
“Yes, I suppose I asked for that,” she said. “You have to understand, Tomas, this isn’t going to be like Ellinburg. Here in Dannsburg I’m afraid everyone of consequence knows me, and no one knows you at all. That reputation you depend on simply does not exist here.”
That was what I had thought too, but I’d soon change that.
Once Ailsa had finished her glass of wine and retired to her room for the night, I sent a houseman to bring Fat Luka to me. He settled awkwardly in the drawing room, and I put a glass of brandy in his hand.
“Tell me your thoughts,” I said.
“How do you mean, Tomas?”
“You don’t miss anything, Fat Luka, I know that. That’s what I pay you for. We’ve been here half a day; tell me what you think.”
“I don’t like it,” Luka said, after a moment. “There’s too many City Guard, and too many fucking flags, and this house is protected harder than the Golden Chains. There’s something a bit funny here, but I don’t know what it is.”
“That’s what you’re going to find out for me,” I told him. “Take a bag of silver, and Oliver and Emil for muscle, and go have a night out. Find the rough part of the city; there must be one. Find our streets, here. Grease some palms and start figuring out how this city works.”
“Aye, right, boss,” Luka said.
Now that there was work to be done he had gone back to calling me boss, I noticed, not Tomas. We might have found a friendship of sorts, but business would always come first with us and that was only right. He drained his brandy and stood up, and gave me a look like he had something on his mind.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“Nothing,” Luka said eventually. “Night, boss.”
“Oh, fuck it,” I said as he turned away. “I’ll come with you.”
Luka grinned like that was what he had been wanting to hear, and I went upstairs to open the traveling chests that had been brought up to my bedroom. My room adjoined Ailsa’s, the same as it did in Ellinburg, but here there wasn’t even a connecting door. That suited me fine; I had no desire for her to hear me getting ready to go out. No doubt she would find out about it anyway, but by then it would be done and nothing she could do to stop me.
Ten minutes later I met Fat Luka in the grand hall, and now I had a well-made but plain cloak on over my fine coat, and the Weeping Women buckled around my waist. Luka was similarly dressed and he had a shortsword and dagger at his belt as well, and Emil and Oliver both wore the plain russet of servants over their weapons.
Getting out of the house was half the battle, of course, between Ailsa’s men on the door and more of them on the gate, but as her lord husband I could come and go as I pleased. If it had just been Luka and the men, I realized, perhaps the answer might have been different. Even so, I thought as we walked down the street and took a turn at random, I suspected Ailsa had already been told that we had gone off into the city.
Still, she hadn’t said I couldn’t, and she surely knew I wouldn’t have paid her any mind even if she had. Ailsa was a Queen’s Man and my wife, but she wasn’t my boss, not to my mind she wasn’t. Not in Ellinburg, and not here in this strange city she called home either.
Luka and I had plenty of silver in our purses and I even had a couple of gold crowns for emergencies, and we were both armed and had two bodyguards with us. Dannsburg held no terrors for us that night.
Truth be told, this part of the city was very fine, all high buildings of pale stone. There were lanterns lit every twenty yards or so, hanging on iron hooks from the walls of the houses. That was no use to me. I was sick to my throat of society and manners and servants and how things were supposed to be done. I wanted to find my sort of people, the people who knew how things were really done.
I thought Ailsa was actually that sort of person too, but she moved behind such a thick blind of society manners and secrecy and sheer money that it was impossible to tell. The Queen’s Men got things done, I knew that much, but exactly how remained a mystery to me.
After we had walked another couple of streets and seen nothing to interest us I heard shouting in the distance, and that was a lot more promising. We headed that way. The sounds led us down a narrower but still well-to-do street, and here there were smart inns and the closed shops of expensive tailors and glovers and milliners. There were a group of City Guard there as well, and they were kicking the living shit out of a pair of beggars.
These were the first beggars I had seen since we had arrived in the city, and I realized that was what had seemed to be missing. It’s a funny thing, how you grow so accustomed to the sight of street people that you almost don’t see them until they’re not there, and you wonder what’s wrong.
“Oi!” I called out, striding toward the Guard with my three men behind me. “What’s the problem here?”
One of the guardsmen turned to face me, obviously the boss of them, and he looked me up and down. I could see him taking in the high-gloss polish of my boots and the fine cut of my coat under my open cloak. I wasn’t known here, no, but money is known everywhere and I quite clearly had plenty of that.
“Vagrancy is a crime, m’lord,” the guardsman growled, and I knew it was only my fine clothes and a fear of who I might be that prevented him from giving me a taste of what the beggars had got.
“Then find them somewhere to go,” I said. “Hitting them won’t make them stop existing.”
The guardsman snorted. “Get caught three times and they’ll stop existing all right, you mark my words. Three offenses and they’ll hang. M’lord.”
“I see,” I said.
That seemed harsh, but they were no one I knew and I was in a strange city where they did things their own way. That was their business, to my mind.
We walked on, and we found what we were looking for eventually.
A river ran through Dannsburg, and it was soon clear that the far bank was what might be called the wrong side of the city, as far as most folk were concerned. Dannsburg wasn’t industrial in the way that Ellinburg was and the river itself looked reasonably clean, but the streets on the far side of the stone bridge we crossed were anything but. Where there had been lanterns on the walls before, now there was oppressive darkness, broken only by the occasional smoking torch or red lamps in alcoves a
bove the doors of what were obviously brothels.
“Here we are,” Fat Luka muttered to himself, and I knew what he meant.
This was home, to my mind, but of course here in Dannsburg it was nothing of the sort. Here it would be home to someone like me, I could only assume, but these weren’t my streets. This wasn’t the Stink and I wasn’t known here, and I knew I had to remember that.
We found a tavern and went in, nodding respectfully to the hulking brute on the door as we passed. Of course, I wasn’t really dressed for a place like this, not when I didn’t own it anyway, and I could feel the stares following me as I walked slowly into the room with Fat Luka and our two men behind me.
There was a young man with perhaps sixteen years to him sitting at a table with a mug of beer by his hand and three upturned shells on the scarred wood in front of him. I knew that game, and so did every lad in the Stink.
“Find the pea, m’lord,” he called out. “Only a silver penny a bet, and five to one.”
“I won a whole mark off him not ten minutes ago, m’lord,” said his shill in the crowd, right on cue. “Ever so easy, it is. You’ve just got to keep your eye on the shell he puts the pea under, and you can’t lose.”
I turned and fixed them both with a stare.
“Don’t take me for a cunt,” I said. “I was running that game when you were still sucking on your ma’s tit. Who’s the boss in these parts?”
The shell boy coughed into his beer and looked up at me, and I could see in his face that he had realized I was a businessman and not the easy mark he had taken me for.
“Mr. Grachyev’s the boss,” he said quietly, “but he don’t come in here. You want to talk business, you might want to speak to Leonov, over at the bar.”
I nodded my thanks to him and went that way, where three large and unwelcoming men were standing around a fellow wearing a decent-looking coat.
“You’ll be Leonov,” I said to the man in the coat. “My name is Tomas Piety.”
“Nice for you,” Leonov said. “You sound like the east.”
“Ellinburg,” I agreed. “The Pious Men.”
Leonov nodded slowly. “Might be I’ve heard of you,” he said. “What the fuck are you doing here, and with only three men behind you?”
“Nothing uncivil,” I assured him. “I’m visiting Dannsburg, that’s all, and I’m looking to make some friends while I’m here. The right sort of friends, you understand me?”
“Aye,” Leonov said after a moment. “Perhaps.”
“This is Fat Luka,” I said, introducing him. “Luka handles my diplomatic interests, as you might say. I’d be obliged if you and him between you could broker a meeting between me and Mr. Grachyev.”
I could see that each recognized something of a kindred spirit in the other. Luka and Leonov shook hands, and Luka’s hand had a silver mark in it.
“Right,” Leonov said, after a moment. “We can do that.”
That was how I started to do business in Dannsburg.
TWENTY-FIVE
The next morning I had to answer to Ailsa, of course. She was not well pleased, to speak lightly of it, but then I had never supposed that she would be.
“You can’t do that, Tomas,” she hissed at me over breakfast that morning.
We were seated in a small dining room that was half again the size of the one we had at home in Ellinburg. At least the size of the room meant that the servants who lined the walls were too far away to hear what we were saying. I supposed that was something.
“I can’t what, go out for a drink with my friend Luka? And why’s that, Ailsa?”
“Go south of the river,” she said. “No one of quality in Dannsburg goes south of the river, wasn’t that plain to see with your own eyes?”
“Aye, and that’s why I went there,” I said. “That’s my part of the city, Ailsa, right there. Anyway, no need to trouble yourself over it. I had a drink and a very pleasant conversation with a man I have some things in common with, that’s all. If Fat Luka does his job, then in a week or two I might be having a sit-down with his boss, to get to know each other as it were, but if it makes you happy I can invite him here instead.”
Ailsa gave me a look like daggers, but I could tell she knew I was just making mischief with her. Even I wasn’t so uneducated as to know that receiving this Mr. Grachyev at Ailsa’s house was out of the question.
“Yes,” she sighed, after a moment. “Yes, there might be some use to it, and these are your sort of people. The right man for the right job, isn’t that what you always say? You’re definitely the right man for mixing with scum like those.”
She meant to insult me, I knew, but I didn’t care and for the simple reason that she was right. These were my sort of people, not the society fools she kept trying to introduce me to. I would never be one of them and they would never accept me, and we both knew it. Still, it seemed that wasn’t going to keep her from trying.
“We have an engagement this afternoon,” she said. “Word has already spread that I have returned home, and invitations are starting to come in.”
“What sort of engagement?”
“A bear bait,” she said. “Lord Lan Yetrov has had a bear pit built at his house. He very much enjoys the sport.”
“Why the fuck would I want to watch that?”
“You don’t have to watch it if you don’t care for it, but you do have to mingle and be seen. There will already be a great deal of gossip about this mysterious new husband I have brought home with me from the east. People need to see you and become . . . accustomed to you.”
“Why?” I asked. “What the fuck does it matter what these people think of me?”
“One day it might matter a great deal,” she said, and then she lifted the small silver bell beside her on the table and rang for more tea.
Apparently that was the end of the conversation. So that was to be my afternoon then, watching some poor bloody bear having dogs set on it for the entertainment of fools.
So far I had to say I didn’t care for Dannsburg.
* * *
* * *
Jochan had thought my house in Ellinburg was a palace, the first time he saw it. Truth be told, at the time so had I, and I could only think how this Lord Lan Yetrov would have laughed at that.
Lan Yetrov’s house was three times the size even of Ailsa’s, with high walls around the extensive gardens and armed guards in his house livery on the gate. Our carriage rattled past them, and we stepped down outside the imposing stone building. Servants directed our coachman toward the stable block where the carriages of those other guests who had already arrived were lined up.
We were ushered inside the house by waiting footmen. They served us wine in tall goblets, and little things to eat that I neither wanted nor enjoyed. The hall was huge. Where the gallery in my house in Ellinburg was wooden with a finely carved staircase that I had thought so grand, here everything was marble and polished stone and gilded metal. Two huge stairs swept up to the second-floor gallery where musicians played for the entertainment of those gathered below.
Ailsa and I were dressed well, richly in truth, but even Ailsa was outshone by the gowns of many of the ladies present. This was true society, I realized, Dannsburg society. This was the royal city, after all, and many of those present were probably courtiers. The man nearest me, a gray-haired fellow in a black silk brocade coat and sash of cloth-of-gold, could have been a duke for all I knew. This assembly put all the fools in Ellinburg to shame.
“We must greet our host,” Ailsa said out of the corner of her mouth. “Let me take the lead.”
I nodded and followed her as she threaded her way across the room, exchanging smiles and courtesies with people she knew along the way. Ailsa knew a great deal of people there, I soon came to realize, and I started to understand how this worked.
She was a Queen’s Man, a diplomat a
nd a spy and a killer, and yet placed so highly in society that I heard her address a countess by her given name. Oh yes, Ailsa was a weapon indeed in the crown’s arsenal, I realized, but a weapon that was better placed to turn inward than anywhere else. It seemed to me that a good part of the work of the Queen’s Men involved watching the queen’s own subjects.
“My dear Lord Lan Yetrov,” Ailsa said at last, greeting an overly dressed young man who was leaning possessively close to a woman who wore a queen’s ransom in diamonds around her throat. “I must thank you for your gracious invitation. Please allow me to present my husband, Father Tomas Piety.”
The man turned to us with a smile on his face.
“Charmed,” he said. “A priest, you say?”
“Aye, I’m that,” I said, “and a businessman too. Pleased to meet you.”
The smile curdled on his face when he heard me speak.
“You are from . . . is that Ellinburg, I hear in your voice?”
“Aye.”
“And are you looking forward to the entertainment?”
This was where I was supposed to tell him a flattering lie, I knew, but fuck that. I already didn’t like him, and I could tell he felt the same way about me.
“I don’t much care for cruelty for its own sake,” I said. “Cruelty should have a purpose to it, to my mind.”
“It’s only sport,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt anyone, does it?”
I thought the bear might have a different opinion about that.
“Doesn’t it?”
“You don’t care for sport, Father Piety?” asked the woman with the diamonds. Lady Lan Yetrov, I assumed.
I looked at this Dannsburg couple and found I didn’t care for them at all. I had never seen a bear bait before, although cockfighting took place often enough in Ellinburg. I didn’t much care for that, either. People in their position should have known better, but what would I know? I was just a commoner with a common accent, after all.
